I decided a week or two ago that I wouldn’t be watching any episodes of Jeen-Yuhs, the biographical Kanye West kiss-ass doc by Clarence Simmons and Chike Ozah (aka Coodie and Chike).
From Sasha Frere-Jones’ 2.16 Observer review, partially titled “Four Hour Timesuck”…
Excerpt #1: “Kanye is such an inconstant and fragile character that I’m not sure what a diehard Kanye fan would even look like at this point. He has destroyed any sense of trust with his audience. Whatever community he’s being tied to, the deal falls through. With an outright fabulist like Trump, there is an underlying cause: white supremacy and fascism. If you roll with the embarrassment, you are at least playing a long game. But if you accept Kanye’s complete incoherence, what are you rooting for?”
Excerpt #2: “If you were hoping someone would play Frost to Kanye’s Nixon, that person is not Coodie. He’s a hype man precisely where you want the opposite, narrating this entire mess like Quick Draw McGraw pitch-shifted down, and constantly stroking his benefactor’s ego or talking about his own life.”
Excerpt #3: “In a 2002 clip at the beginning of the third episode, Kanye tells the viewer that he feels Rhymefest has disrespected him by saying that Kanye isn’t a genius yet. Rhymefest, perhaps the only person not constantly kissing Kanye’s ass in this movie, says what maybe everyone has been thinking in the eighteen years since The College Dropout: ‘Who are you to call yourself a genius? It’s for other people to look at you and say. ‘That man’s a genius.’ For you to feel disrespected because somebody doesn’t think of you as something, you gotta get yourself together, man.’
“Startled by the rare pushback, Kanye lamely tries to pretend he is joking, again. He has, as of today, not gotten himself together.”